Experiences, Ideas and Insights by User Experience Design Experts working at Mindtree Ltd. Welcome to possible.

Monday, 4 October 2010

Playful children and creative thinking

Children are a great source of creativity when it comes to games and entertainment. Children are interesting to be learned and studied. Kids seem to be ignorant, but they are very creative than most adults are. They can turn anything into a game. Here you can see the pictures of children playing. I found them pretty interesting, I observed them playing some sort of a game for a while and it gave me insights on the creativity of design.

Setting up the rules

They played this game for about an hour or so. To my amazement, I found that they were following some protocols or rules for this game. It seemed to me that players played the game with predefined game rules. This game consisted of two teams, one on one side and two boys and on the other side. And a baby girl was accompanying them, but did not participate in the game. As I think, the girl is about 18 or 19 months old and probably can’t participate. The players are trying to hit the other player with the sack as seen in the picture. And there was some kind of point system based on the hitting other team. They have made boxes for each team; a team member is not allowed to step outside the square. And if you step outside of the square, if so you lose some points.

If I were to design the game, I will probably relate to the pillow fight that I had with my brother in my childhood. Well, I do not know, how these children made this entertaining game for them. What kind of strategic planning they did? Did they relate to some other game? What is the metaphor they used here? Are there any similar games available? Are they following some framework? Many questions cross my mind.

Creativity with fewer resources

These children are not receiving healthy food, medical facility, not even having proper sanitation facilities, and not having proper shelter. I would doubt that they would have ever played with a toy. They lack the resources that we have in our daily lives. But they do not lack in creativity. I felt that they are amazing designers. They made a game with fewer resources they got.

We also work with fewer resources such as time and money. Our client creates our world wherein we are set to deliver them enjoyment based on the resources they have provided. A designer’s puts on creative hat to provide innovative solutions. We perform strategic planning to determine how we go about doing our activities. We further set rules on how a system should look, what kind of functionality it should possess, how it should behave, we try to determine user goals, usability goals and many more. We provide creative designs to our customer and provide them greater satisfaction and better experience.

Children may not be thinking any of these things that we think about. All that they want is to enjoy the time that they have. As these children, we should thrive to produce creative product in a new way, or invent something that does not exist or reapply an existing process or product into a new or different domain. Hence, creating better experience and happiness to our customers as well for us.